Shame-Faced

Swift Vote

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 14:13:00 -0800

Satire is difficult. And who is the audience for it? George S. Kaufman said: “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” Is that because the audience is too dumb to get it? Or maybe they don’t want a nice evening spoiled by reminders of all that’s wrong with the world?

More to the point, how could an otherwise well-educated woman such as myself have missed out on one of the world’s most famous satires: Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift? For it’s true, I must make the Shame-Faced Admission™ that until now I hadn’t read Swift’s classic book.

Gulliver’s Travels, the full title of which is Travel into Several Remote Nations of the World, recounts, in his own voice, the fantastical adventures of Lemuel Gulliver. In his first tale Gulliver is shipwrecked on an island inhabited by a race of tiny people, his next tale takes him to a land of giants, the third to an island in the sky filled with philosophers and absent-minded scientists (no, not Seattle, but close) and the fourth finds him sharing oats with the admirable Houyhnhnms.

(BTW, this is the third shipwreck in the last four Shame-Faced books I’ve read. It makes me never want to get on a boat again.)

Satire walks a fine line – too funny and you obscure your point. Too obvious and you’ve written a pamphlet. Gulliver’s Travels is known as a book that gets it right. I can add my agreement. Engrossing and imaginative, it posits worlds one can believe, not quite as our own, but with human nature clearly on display.

Before starting the book, I was a bit concerned that I wouldn’t get the allusions and be as lost as Swift would be in the audience for Saturday Night Live. By not knowing much (read: any) of the political history of 18^th century Europe, I’m sure I missed a lot. But there was still plenty to glean from the petty concerns of the Lilliputians and the coarseness of the Brobdingnagians.

Imagine Swift taking in an SNL skit about Paris Hilton. He wouldn’t get the jokes about the sex tape, but he’d recognize a vapid clotheshorse when he saw one. Some failings never go out of style.

Bridge for Dummies

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 23:18:00 -0800

It will come as no surprise to those who have read my previous reports from the world of high culture that not only had I not read Thornton Wilder's The Bridge at San Luis Rey, my concept of the book was way off base.

Oh, I know what you're thinking: "“Here she goes again. Let me guess: she thought The Bridge at San Luis Rey was about the largest metropolitan area in Missouri."

Not even close.

"“No? Then she thought it was about Alec Guinness building a bridge for the Japanese in Burma."

Wrong again. I'm no fool. I knew when the book was written (1927) so I knew it couldn'’t be a tale of World War II.

I assumed it was a World War I story. New Americans out of place in the Old Europe, Iberian division.

So not only do I have to make the Shame-Faced Admission™ that I hadn't read Wilder'’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, I have to admit I was about 200 years and 5000 miles off. I couldn'’t have faked it if the subject came up at a cocktail party. (And why am I never invited to that kind of cocktail party? The few I'’ve attended feature conversations that center around local weather - terrible, and traffic - worse.)

For those of you as clueless as I am (and I'’m hoping there are a few), here'’s the scoop.

Wilder's novel chronicles the lives led by five Peruvians who happen to be on the titular bridge the day it collapses. He begins by telling of a monk who saw the bridge collapse. He investigates the lives of the people who died, sure that what he finds will show that it was the ideal time for each of them to be taken, thus proving, empirically, the existence of the Almighty.

But we are not reading the monk'’s book, which the church promptly burned. The narrator of the book we'’re reading knows all about these five lives and is not out to prove a thing. But the episodes, encompassing cruelty, unrequited love, compassion and wisdom, do prove something. About humanity. About living life with a clear eye and an open heart. We read beautifully drawn examples of pride and humility, art and artifice, religion and faithlessness; and something is proven. Perhaps not about a god who knows the best time for each of us to die, but about the beauty of imperfect humanity.

One For The Road

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Sun, 1 Oct 2006 21:24:00 -0700

How can two Billy Wilder fans have missed The Lost Weekend? In the sixth installment of the Shame-Faced podcast (26 minutes, 9MB), we finally catch up with that movie as well as another landmark film on the subject of alcoholism, Days of Wine and Roses. At the very least, you’ll want to listen to find out how we handle the Shame-Faced opening cocktail.

Direct download it here, or get it at iTunes.

Never A Crossed Sword

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 13:34:00 -0700

Shame-Faced Admission™: I thought I’d read The Three Musketeers.

I had a copy of the swashbuckler by Alexandre Dumas when I was younger. Or what I thought was a copy of it. I read the book, its six-by-four inch pages filled with big print and numerous illustrations, until it fell apart. Repeat viewings of the 1970s Musketeer films, directed by Richard Lester with scripts by Flashman creator George MacDonald Fraser, cemented my imagined familiarity with Dumas’ novel. I was ready to discourse on it at length in plummy gentlemen’s clubs the world over. The gentlemen’s clubs with leather chairs and brandy, not the ones with topless dancers named Brandi. Although I’d talk about Dumas there, too. There’s always at least one dancer going to college.

Realizing that Dumas’ novel was considerably longer didn’t stop me from telling people that I’d read the book. When I heard that a new edition translated by the illustrious Richard Pevear was coming out, I decided it was time to experience the genuine article.

(I owned several “classics” from the same children’s publisher, and may not rectify every situation as I’ve done here. Meaning I will go to my grave insisting that I did indeed read Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. So there.)

My childhood Musketeers focused on the plot, so I was spared the occasional clunkiness of Dumas’ storytelling (most likely the result of the book’s being published serially). But I was also denied the rich pleasures of the author’s voice. Worldly, conspiratorial, larded with nuggets of sound philosophy:

As we know, there is a special god for drunkards and lovers.

A good turn remembered is an insult rendered.

One must speculate on people’s defects, not on their virtues.

The title characters are vividly drawn yet schematic. Porthos, enslaved by his appetites. Aramis, devoted to the church. Athos, haunted by his past. The book’s hero D’Artagnan is a synthesis of their best qualities, and thus the most fleshed out.

Thanks to Charlton Heston, I think of Cardinal Richelieu as a villain. But Dumas’ version is a pure politician, fixated on authority and not ideology. He alone sees the worth of D’Artagnan and his compatriots.

Dumas is so bewitched by the true villain, the cunning Milady de Winter, that he cedes much of the book’s last act to her, forgetting his protagonists entirely. (The Muske-who? How many are there?) Her actions in the extended closing section – in which Milady, unable to use her body to seduce her Puritan jailer, turns the man’s religious beliefs against him – makes Hannibal Lecter look like Bugs Meany, that kid who beats up Encyclopedia Brown.

Milady’s scheming culminates in a shocking act of violence based, as the movies say, on actual events. Dumas treated history as his own personal theme park. If his tale would be improved by involving real-life figures who were long dead, not yet born, or nowhere in the vicinity at the time, in they’d go. Anything to help the action. (Pevear’s meticulous endnotes help keep fact and fiction straight.)

Frankly, I prefer Dumas’ approach. I loathe people who only read historical fiction because “at least I’m learning something.” History is for history books. What I want from a novel is a story, which Dumas delivers in spades. A John Ford movie coined the phrase “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Alexandre Dumas was putting that theory into practice centuries ago.

Seven Chapters Before the Mast

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 13:20:00 -0700

After reading Robinson Crusoe I was in the mood for a not-so-land-locked adventure. I fancied one that took place on the high seas. So I picked up Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.

For isn’t Kidnapped the story of a young man picked up off the streets of England somewhere and taken on some kind of a ship by various ne’er-do-wells and having adventures most exotic amongst pirates and other swarthy types?

Short answer: No.

I suppose it’s here I must make the Shame-Faced Admission™ that not only had I not read Kidnapped, I hadn’t read any books by Stevenson. I think I was getting Kidnapped confused with Treasure Island.

The map in the front of my edition should have been the tip-off. It shows the top half of Scotland from Mull in the west to Edinburgh in the east. That’s it. Just Scotland. It dinnae occur to me until later that the Channel Islands aren’t even on the map, never mind Fiji and other locales where pirates are prevalent.

So what of Kidnapped? Young David Balfour, our hero, is a “steady lad…and a canny goer.” Having been sold out by his miserly uncle (Uncle Ebenezer, in fact. Are all miserly uncles named Ebenezer?) he is kidnapped by greedy and loutish sailors. David’s time aboard ship is brief, but it’s nothing if not eventful. A siege of the roundhouse leads to this sight the next morning. “The floor was covered with broken glass and in a horrid mess of blood, which took away my hunger.” Now that’s adventure on the high seas, even if they weren’t even far enough off the coast to play keno.

When the marine leg of his journey ends abruptly, David must walk his way back across Scotland (I tracked it on the handy map) with Alan Breck. Breck is vain, drinks and gambles and there is no one better to lead David across the heather and back to his uncle’s house. There Uncle Ebenezer gets the comeuppance we’ve been hoping for.

Based on historical events and personages, Kidnapped taught me a bit about the history of Scotland and made me realize how much more I don’t know about it. Even better, this well-loved author confirmed my preferences in traveling companions:

Always opt for the dandy with a silver tongue, especially if he knows how to wield a mean cutlass.

Body Shots

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 23:21:00 -0700

It used to be you could make a sex movie and not have it be, you know, a “sex movie.” In the fifth installment of the Shame-Faced podcast (25 minutes, 9MB), we take a look at two groundbreaking films from an era when films about sex were for adults and not horny teenagers: Last Tango in Paris and Carnal Knowledge.

Direct download it here, or get it at iTunes.

Coming Ayn Rand Again

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 19:56:00 -0700

Here’s the thing about the classics. It takes time to read them, and even more time to come up with marginally interesting observations about them.

Time has been a precious commodity for the two of us of late. Rest assured, new posts and podcasts are in the works. But we did want to freshen up the place a little. So here’s a July 2005 post from VinceKeenan.com on Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel THE FOUNTAINHEAD, one of the posts that got this whole Shame-Faced Admission™ business started.

The New York Times recently described Christopher Cox, the California congressman nominated to the Securities and Exchange Commission by President Bush, as “a devoted student” of Ayn Rand. Raising the prospect that fifty years from now, one of President (Chelsea) Clinton’s nominees might be “a devoted student” of Dan Brown.

Later, George Will claimed Cox’s enthusiasm for Rand was overstated. The Rand Institute said that Cox’s first act should be to abolish the commission he’s been named to lead.

Rand has always seemed like something you should read at an impressionable age, like Tolkien or Interview With The Vampire. I never got to those. Saw the movies, though.

Over the years I’ve picked up a little about Rand’s philosophy of objectivism. Most of what I know about her I learned from a guy who lived in my freshman dorm. Over Christmas break, he read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and came back to school a changed man. I can still remember him striding down the hall upon his return, arms spread messianically wide. When he reached his room, he pulled a marker out of his coat and wrote EGO in huge letters on the door. Only then did he enter, smoke a few Winstons and doze off.

What made an impression on me was the fact that he’d carried the pen with him. No stopping to search through luggage for him. I respect anyone who inspires others to feats of showmanship, and vowed to read one of Rand’s novels.

What can I say? The last few years have been a little busy.

First, as a work of fiction: The only character who behaves in a remotely human fashion is the one Rand holds up to ridicule. In a book purportedly about architecture, her descriptions of the craft make no sense. The ending is ludicrous. Her style is turgid.

But I couldn’t stop reading. Rand’s tale spans decades and includes epic grudges, thwarted passions, dizzying rises and falls. She wrote in an era when authors strove to tell big stories, and the force of her narrative carries the day.

As a philosophical work, things get a tad muddled. But the core ideas – the power of the individual, the dangers of groupthink – resonated with me. It’s easy to see how they could be misinterpreted or misapplied. There’s a section on discrediting someone through false charges (“Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable?”) that seems to have been grafted directly into contemporary political playbooks. I’d wager that free-market conservatives like Cox respond to Rand’s notion that there’s nothing evil about the desire to make money or even spending it to enjoy luxury. But they probably miss her larger point that money is only a means to an end, and that personal luxury eventually becomes a wasted effort to impress others.

I’m still immature enough to feel pride at finishing a book that’s over 700 pages long and doesn’t feature a boy wizard. Eventually I’ll tackle Atlas Shrugged. I have to rest my arms first.

Le Cinema

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 14:43:00 -0700

Can something be irregularly scheduled? If so, that’s the Shame-Faced podcast. Episode four (25 minutes, 9MB) looks at two classics of world cinema that Rosemarie and I somehow missed. They both happen to be French: The 400 Blows and The Rules of the Game.

Direct download it here, or get it at iTunes.

Solitary Man

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Fri, 7 Jul 2006 13:53:00 -0700

The other day I was standing at the bus stop reading a book. A co-worker came by and asked what I was reading that day. I knew he wasn’t expecting to be impressed since the last time he ventured to ask that question I was reading Dean and Me (A Love Story) by Jerry Lewis.

My co-worker, thinking me that pop culture kind of gal, raised his eyebrows when I held up the cover for his inspection. He’s awestruck, I thought. “Robinson Crusoe,” he said “I read that when I was a sophomore.” I resisted the urge to bean him with the book, both because it was a small paperback and wouldn’t have done much harm and because I had just gotten to the part about the cannibals. I needed to see what happened next.

That’s right. I have a Shame-Faced Admission™ to make: I didn’t read Robinson Crusoe in high school. Hadn’t read it a word of it until now.

So why wasn’t this classic book on the sophomore curriculum at Saint Agnes Academic School?

1) Saint Agnes was a girls’ school and perhaps the sisters thought of this as a boys’ book. I can understand why. There’s all kinds of manly business, like shipwrecks and chopping down trees.

2) Maybe the sisters didn’t like Defoe’s attitude toward Catholics. There are some knocks against Papists and the Inquisition. Not that the Inquisition was held in high esteem by Roman Catholics in Queens in 1978, but we didn’t need some long-dead English Protestant to remind us about it.

Of course, there are reasons Robinson Crusoe, originally published in 1719, should have been on the reading list.

1) No sex. Not even the thought of it passes through Robinson Crusoe’s mind in almost 30 years on the island. Not that I’d have liked to hear details of his fantasy life, but in all his desire for human companionship, he never longs for that particular joy a female could bring to his domestic bliss. You can bet my classmates would have had a heated discussion over that topic.

2) Sophomores could stand to learn about self-sufficiency. Robinson Crusoe has that in spades. He can bring home the bacon (OK, goat) and fry it up in the pan. He can build anything out of anything, or nothing. He’s a sticks-and-stones MacGyver.

As Crusoe whiled away his years on the island I was sure I’d get bored but somehow that never happened. Defoe gets you on Crusoe’s side very quickly. I became fascinated with what he was thinking and doing. There was no way I was going stop reading and leave him alone.

Speaking of Crusoe’s thinking, you couldn’t get more pragmatic. The man was his own cognitive psychologist. Crusoe would make Albert Ellis proud with his accepting the way things are and moving ahead with what needs to be done. No time for whining, or wondering what would have happened if, or blaming his parents, his shipmates or the shoddy workmanship of the boat. Nope. He gets some sleep, sees what he can salvage off the boat and doesn’t dwell on the past.

That might be the only lesson I can take from the book. I have to admit I’m no closer to knowing how to build a fire or locate a sea turtle’s delicious eggs. God helps those who help themselves indeed, but what about those who have been helping themselves to whole roasted chickens at the supermarket? I fear we’re on our own.

Bugsy, Alone

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:00:00 -0700

Take the Shame-Faced Admission™ that I’d never read any Franz Kafka – including “The Metamorphosis” – as a given. He made the top of the queue because of another Shame-Faced Admission™: other than Gregor Samsa awakening from unsettling dreams to find himself transformed into a cockroach, I knew nothing about Kafka’s masterpiece.

You’d think somebody would have said something. With a work of this renown, inklings of what happens next typically come from a range of sources. Jeopardy! questions, obscure references in Maureen Dowd columns, cocktail party mentions of that heartbreaking scene when Gregor loses his job as mascot for the Bratislava Bugs (Go, Fightin’ Chitin!) when the team discovers he’s not some method actor wearing a costume.

Nope. All I ever heard was Samsa, dreams, cockroach. It’s as if no one ever read past the famous opening sentence.

The surprises began early: Gregor doesn’t turn into a cockroach at all but “a monstrous vermin.” Earlier translations opted for “gigantic insect.” At one point, a minor character calls Gregor an “old dung beetle,” but take it from a native New Yorker – a dung beetle ain’t a cockroach. Kafka deliberately left the description vague, forcing the reader to envision Gregor’s new, repellent form. That decision only magnifies the profound feeling of alienation.

If an author of literary fiction were to tackle this story now, it would be preoccupied with matters of biology and pages would be devoted to the merging of human and insect consciousness. The depiction of the psychology of this hybrid creature – similar to Brundlefly, from the David Cronenberg remake of The Fly – would be the point of the exercise. But Kafka has no interest in such parlor tricks. Gregor remains sad, lonely Gregor even when he becomes a bug. It’s the kind of thing that only happens in dreams.

Which is fitting, as Kafka is peerless when it comes to recreating their logic. Gregor begins to fear that his *ahem* new look will make him late for work, and at that moment a clerk pounds on his door to find out why he’s tardy – before he’s tardy. It illustrates the true meaning of Kafkaesque; it’s not pointless absurdity but the sense of the inevitable laboring hand in hand with the unfathomable.

Gregor’s concerns about office politics when he clearly has bigger problems cut to the heart of what “The Metamorphosis” is about: the dehumanizing nature of work. (Gregor is in sales. From Kafka to Glengarry Glen Ross. Can we all agree that salesman is the worst gig known to man and insect?) He’d rather sacrifice his humanity than report to his job, mainly because he feels he’s sacrificed his humanity already. If you put the same choice to the lead character in Office Space, I know what he’d pick: scuttling in the dark and avoiding Roach Motels.

Kafka doesn’t just rail against work but any type of obligation, even family. The mother, father and sister that Gregor is supporting are the ones who are truly monstrous. He may be a human spirit trapped in the most loathsome of carapaces, but his kin possess the souls of insects, evidenced by their reaction to Gregor’s ultimate fate.

As for the other stories in this collection, some of them I didn’t get, like “The Judgment.” “A Hunger Artist” and “In the Penal Colony” are disquieting works that reflect on the artist’s relationship with the audience and the role of asceticism in creativity. At least, I think they do. None of them holds a candle to “The Metamorphosis,” which for now ranks as the most disturbing thing I’ve ever read. Unless you count some T. J. Hooker fan fiction I wrote when I was younger, and believe me, you don’t want to.

Gender Blender

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 15:42:00 -0700

Episode three of the Shame-Faced podcast (26 minutes, 9MB) is an experiment in counter-programming. Rosemarie picks a classic chick flick for me to watch that I’d never seen, The Way We Were, while I help her fill a void in her cinematic education by showing her Dirty Harry, one of the greatest of guy films. Plus a few more goodies. Direct download it here or get it at iTunes.

As for posts on matters literary, don’t worry. One’s a-comin’.

Dream(un)weaver

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Fri, 9 Jun 2006 12:23:00 -0700

"A dream is a wish your heart makes when you're fast asleep."

Substitute mind for heart and you've got the Freudian conception of the dream.

After years of priding myself on being well-versed in the various psychological theories and even more years of being a Woody Allen fan, I still have a Shame-Faced Admission™ to make: I had never read any of the writings of Sigmund Freud. You remember Freud, don't you? He was quite famous for a while there. Father of the unconscious, ur-Viennese psychiatrist, noted pipe smoker? You know the guy. Starting in the 70's with the rise of feminism, he became a bit passé. And now with a medication for every mood, he's old news. Who wants to spend 15 years on the couch talking about their childhood when a selective serotonin uptake inhibitor can get you get you back to work in a week. And yet...

The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1900, feels brand new. Freud presents masturbation dreams, Oedipal dreams, and dreams about gathering great rewards in one's chosen profession. All that, plus he analyzes many of his own dreams here. It's practically one of those best selling memoirs: "Dreamcatcher: A Psychiatrist's Non-Waking Life." The only thing that marks it as not of this century is the untranslated French and Latin. My French is poor and my Latin limited. In fact, once I heard the Dude say "You mean coitus?" I lost whatever Latin words I had left.

(And by the way, how come my posts always refer to sex and Vince's are pure intellect? Is he that much classier than me? So be it. I won't be ashamed of that.)

"I like dreaming. 'Cause dreaming can make you mine."

Not only does Dreams feel fresh, it rings true. "A dream is a wish fulfilled," says Freud. He then proceeds to demonstrate how even anxiety dreams hide an unconscious wish that the conscious mind is trying to hide. I wish he was around today. If I could afford it, I’d ask him about that dream I had where a pack of Dobermans paced around my bed. I bet he could help with that. Oh well, if it happens again I’ll just get up and watch the 80’s Gold infomercial.

"Last night I dreamt that somebody loved me."

Apparently songwriters are the only Freudians left.

Guys & Dolls, The Movies

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Sun, 4 Jun 2006 18:43:00 -0700

Guy movies. Chick flicks. Everybody knows what the staples of each type are. And everybody knows which ones they haven’t seen.

In installment two of the Shame-Faced podcast, Rosemarie and I delve into what makes a movie work for each gender. We also finally get around to watching a classic chick flick (Dirty Dancing) and guy movie (The Great Escape) that both of us somehow missed.

All that and more in Shame-Faced the podcast, episode two. Direct download all twenty-two minutes and 8MB of it, or get it at iTunes. Either way, it’s some good listening.

Russian To Judgment

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Mon, 29 May 2006 14:50:00 -0700

For years, I’ve compared anything convoluted – or simply long – to a Russian novel. Meetings that run over an hour, stories about disastrous holiday trips, that was my default summation: “It was like a Russian novel.” Alluding to your own erudition while implying there are great psychological depths to what has just transpired; trust me, there is no more lethal arrow in the pseudo-intellectual quiver.

A few years ago I made the Shame-Faced Admission™ that I’d never actually read a Russian novel, and finally picked one up so I’d know what I was talking about. It took me months to finish Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and not just because it’s as thick as, well, a Russian novel. I could only muddle through a few pages per day, baffled and at times put off by its neurotic intensity.

But all became clear by the transcendent ending, and I’m glad I stuck with it. There’s the added bonus of being able to see homages to it elsewhere. Realizing that Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket was essentially an unofficial adaptation of C&P almost compensated for the fact that I didn’t like the movie. (Bresson loved working with untrained actors. I believe, in movies and in life, you should always go with professionals.)

It was another film that got me interested in reading Notes From Underground. I’d heard that Paul Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver was greatly influenced by Dostoevsky and this work in particular. NFU is about a quarter of the length of C&P, so onto the queue it went.

The book is oddly structured. An unnamed narrator – a 40-year-old civil servant in St. Petersburg – lays out his beliefs on how the human animal functions, then recounts three anecdotes from his own miserable life illustrating his points. Somehow it works.

For a 140-year-old story, it remains shocking and vital, in part because it’s almost too honest about how people think. Its portrait of mankind is surprisingly contemporary. Run down this checklist of behavior and see if it reminds you of anyone you know:

- Relying on fantasy instead of actual accomplishment (“I invented adventures for myself and made up a life, so as at least to live in some way”)

- Brooding over slights, perceived and actual

- Concocting elaborate plans to avenge these slights that never come off as intended

- Being a jerk just ‘cause (“to take offense simply on purpose, for nothing”)

- Embracing your own misery because it justifies your self-absorption (“I will ask ... an idle question: which is better – cheap happiness or exalted suffering?”)

- Whipsawing between feelings of inferiority and superiority when it comes to co-workers and friends

- Using the pointlessness of life to excuse your own inertia (“I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything”)

- Considering your boorishness as doing the rest of the world a favor (“Resentment – why, it is a purification; it is a most stinging and painful consciousness”)

That’s right. What we have here is not merely an existentialist classic, but the George Costanza playbook.

Wait. You didn’t think I was talking about myself, did you? It’s not like Mr. Underground feigns expertise in areas he knows nothing about and passes off stories he’s heard as first-hand experience and oh, forget it.

Radio, Radio

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Tue, 23 May 2006 22:23:00 -0700

I’ll bet you thought we forgot about you, didn’t you? Well, don’t you worry. We’re back, and we’ve cooked up something special.

Join us, won’t you, as Shame-Faced takes to the air!

Rosemarie and I have prepared the inaugural Shame-Faced podcast. Twenty-two minutes of rapier wit. 8 MBs of razor-sharp repartee. We talk about the genesis of the project, recap what’s been done so far, offer a hint of what’s to come, and respond to some of the questions and comments that have come our way. All this, plus fine music courtesy of Evan Tate. And for free!

You can direct download the podcast here, or find it at iTunes if all goes well. It should be available at other podcast sites shortly.

Don’t worry. More posts are coming soon. In the meantime, give a listen and let us know what you think.

Footnotes, Don't Fail Me Now

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Thu, 11 May 2006 15:33:00 -0700

Rosemarie: There’s one problem with writing about the classics. What are we supposed to say that hasn’t been said?

Me: That’s the beauty part. We’re not writing about the classics. We’re writing about our reaction to them.

Rosemarie: (beat) If you say so.

Pity the man who can’t heed his own advice.

I take on a few well-regarded novels and come over all knock-kneed, as if I were still in Mrs. Bytheway’s class. (A fine English teacher, as you’d expect from someone whose last name is a prepositional phrase. I wonder if the kids today call her Mrs. BTW?)

My posts to date have been equal parts diligent book report and review that’s several decades late. This is supposed to be about me, dammit. Herewith, a few thoughts that I should have included during the first go-round.

On The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: What I love about this book is that it conveys the ideal of the American character. A clear-eyed skepticism as well as a faith in one’s fellow man. A respect for the profound feelings provoked by religion coupled with suspicion for those who traffic in those feelings. It looks askance at those in power while acknowledging that somebody has to hold the reins. Huckleberry Finn is a living, vibrant book in part because anyone who recommends it – parent, teacher, politician – will be roundly mocked within its pages.

On Ernest Hemingway: No one is saying that the man needed more jokes. But what I come away with after reading two of his books is a sense of the burden of masculinity. When you’re a man, there’s no room for levity. I was reminded of those actors who are vaguely embarrassed by their trade and indulge in macho theatrics even when they’re out of the spotlight. There’s a rigidity to Hemingway’s sensibility that implies he’d sooner break than bend.

Or maybe the flawed sensibility is my own. Perhaps I can only deal with ideas in quotes. So much of the crime fiction I’ve read explores the codes of masculinity even as it occasionally satirizes them – I’m looking at you, Robert B. Parker – or, if presenting a stoic, at least delves into what motivates that behavior. Hemingway doesn’t bother with such inquiries. In his austere world, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. He calls a spade a spade, usually more than once, and gets on with it. It’s a bit tough for me to warm to that style.

Ah. That’s a load off my chest. I’ll try to make future posts more like this one – and Rosemarie’s – and less like homework.

Life During Wartime

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Wed, 10 May 2006 14:03:00 -0700

In a project like this, you know that there will be books and movies that don’t do it for you. I swore I’d be honest about that. I just didn’t think that moment would come so soon.

Earlier, I made the Shame-Faced Admission™ that I’d never read any of Ernest Hemingway’s longer work. A sly anonymous commenter suggested The Old Man and the Sea, a “literary purgative” that would “get that crazy little hankering for Hemingway right out of (my) system.”

Well, Mr. or Ms. Smartyboots, you weren’t the first person to deliver that heads-up. I’d already decided not to start there. I also opted not to rush pell-mell into the work that interested me the most, his account of the “lost generation” The Sun Also Rises.

Instead, I went with 1929’s A Farewell to Arms, widely regarded as one of the finest novels of World War I.

I admired the book enormously. I just didn’t care for it.

Frederic Henry, a volunteer in the Italian Army, falls in love with Catherine, an English nurse, as he convalesces from injury. The twinned experiences of love and war reveal a great deal of life to him, perhaps too much for such a young man.

Papa, naturally, is at his best depicting the camaraderie forged between men in battle, and the deep thoughts that war provokes:

“There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity ... Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of regiments and the dates.”

But that insistence on simplicity, which has the formal elegance of Shaker furniture in the Nick Adams stories, becomes constraining in longer work. At times Hemingway seems not to trust words, repeating humble nouns as if hoping to grant them the power of an incantation. In “Big Two-Hearted River” it worked, and it does here when Hemingway allows the language to take on a Joycean* rhythm of its own:

“Hard as the floor of the car to lie not thinking only feeling, having been away too long, the clothes wet and the floor moving only a little each time and lonesome inside, alone with wet clothing and hard floor for a wife.”

Over the length of a novel, though, the repetition is numbing.

My lukewarm reaction to A Farewell to Arms stems mainly from two other factors. The tragic climax is obvious from the outset, yet manages to feel tacked on. And Catherine never registers as a character, muting what little impact the ending had.

Not an ideal reading experience. But I’ve finally absorbed some Hemingway and developed a few opinions of my own about him, which is the point of the exercise. I still plan on reading The Sun Also Rises. I even intend to tackle The Old Man and the Sea. But I’m in no hurry to do so.

*Bonus Shame-Faced Admission™: I haven’t read any Joyce, either. I just think I know what he sounds like. Will this posing never end?

In Which I Slip Myself A Finn

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Mon, 1 May 2006 14:16:00 -0700

The writer William Goldman once observed to some book editors that he had done all of his “serious reading” by the time he was 25. The editors all agreed that the same was true of them.

Whereas I did absolutely no “serious reading” by the time I was 25, unless Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators count. I was assigned some of the great books in school, but those were homework. I grumbled while I read them, skipped entire chapters, relied on vague summaries from classmates. I aced my English unit on The Scarlet Letter thanks to a project in which I transplanted the opening pages to a lunar colony, but I don’t consider myself as having read Hawthorne’s novel.

All of which leads me to this two-part Shame-Faced Admission™: I’d never read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And I’m glad I didn’t. The younger me wouldn’t have enjoyed it anywhere near as much.

The under-25 me wouldn’t have appreciated Twain’s language. I would have resented the modicum of extra work his remarkable use of the vernacular represented. But the older, sophisticated me relished Twain’s singular voice, which flows with the force of the Mississippi itself.

It’s only fitting that this novel prompted an evaluation of my younger incarnation, because Huck’s exploits on the river make up one of the great coming of age stories. He learns any number of vital life lessons, foremost among them that you can’t pray a lie and that, in the words of Tom Sawyer, “Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.”

In a book packed with memorable scenes – like any of the cons perpetrated by the King and the Duke – I’d have to single out Colonel Sherburn’s lethal analysis of mob mentality. The fact that Sherburn is guilty of the crime that provoked such wrath only adds to its power.

An afterword to the edition I read touches on the view that the closing chapters, in which Tom Sawyer prolongs Jim’s imprisonment so he can be freed in high style, weaken the book. I understand the argument, but I don’t agree with it. Tom’s games are a reminder of how much Huck has grown, and of how a child’s love of showmanship isn’t necessarily the worst thing to hang onto as you move into adulthood.

Speaking of Jim, Huckleberry Finn is still frequently banned in schools because of charges that the book is racist. Having finally read it, I can’t even take that question seriously.

Speaking of Tom Sawyer, here’s another Shame-Faced Admission™ for you: I haven’t read that book, either. I’ve got my work cut out for me.

Roman Holiday

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 14:50:00 -0700

Shame-Faced Admission™: I've never read anything about the Roman Emperors.

I’ve encountered them, of course. I watched I, Claudius back in the 70’s but I don’t remember much of it - bare sets and nasty things happening off screen. I saw a production of Julius Caesar at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1978. The only thing I remember about that is seeing Richard Dreyfus in a toga. (Yes, it was as unforgettable as you imagine.)

But there I was in Borders a few weeks ago and they were having a special on Penguin Classics. Among the three I bought (for the price of two) was Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars. The translation is by Robert Graves, who apparently used quite a bit of Suetonius’ material for I, Claudius. The Twelve Caesars takes you from Julius Caesar through Domitian in easy to read form. And it was very easy reading. I don’t know why I’m always so cowed by the ancient texts. They’re usually full of bloodshed and sex, just like my regular reading.

I thought perhaps I’d learn some business lessons from reading this book. I’m always on the lookout for management tips. If Star Trek and the Sopranos can be used to teach us about leadership, why not some of the most famous rulers of all time? Having finished the book, here’s the one lesson I can pass along: do not join a managment team where the mode of succession is assassination. It’s just not worth it.

The book was great reading. Each emperor’s entry starts out with some family history and then dives right in to the good stuff. Incest, cross-dressing, torture, murders. Not to mention buggering and pantomime. (But really, how could I not mention them?)

When I was little, our kitchen radio was always tuned to WNEW-AM. They had an ad for a restaurant called S.P.Q.R. that started with a man intoning “The Senate and the People of Rome.” I had his voice in my head throughout my reading of this book. It worked well – keeping me thinking about the people who had to live their day to day lives under this kind of regime.

There’s time for one more lesson. I pass it along for the benefit of those who will one day be celebrities (it’s too late for those who already are): untold riches, supreme power and terrestrial deification can lead a person to the worst kind of behavior. So do like the rappers say, kids, and keep it real.

Nobody does it better

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Sun, 9 Apr 2006 19:18:00 -0700

I grew up in a house full of books. Not an intellectual house, like in a Woody Allen movie where the shelves are filled with Rilke, Schopenhauer and other great names. Nope, our bookcases had paperbacks stacked two-deep: Agatha Christie, Louis L’Amour, P.G. Wodehouse, John Jakes. All the popular writers were welcome. And I read them all.

Well, just about all.

Shame-Faced Admission™: I’d never read a James Bond novel. That is to say, an Ian Fleming novel whose main character was James Bond. There they were on the shelf: five, maybe ten volumes in red covers, but I never picked one up.

I can’t say exactly why. Maybe it was seeing Live and Let Die at 10 years old. The movie seemed silly and complicated. It certainly didn’t send me rushing to the novels. Not when Bertie Wooster was in the house.

But after seeing some Sean Connery Bond films I knew it was time to read a 007 novel. I’ve just finished my first: The Spy Who Loved Me.

The chief thing to know about this book is that James Bond is not the main character. Not by a long shot. The narrator is a Canadian woman named Vivienne Michel. Shapely of figure and ill-treated by men, she is taking a respite from her romantic complications in an Adirondack motel about to close for the season. She spends the first half of the book thinking back on how her naiveté and bad luck with men have led her to this isolated haven in the woods.

I kept waiting for super villains and secret lairs, but no luck. Or should I say great luck. By the time the bad guys show up we know this girl and hope she can save herself. Turns out she doesn’t have to because James Bond shows up too. There’s no steel-toothed henchman on his trail, just a flat tire causing him to stop at the motel. Of course he saves the day and our heroine gets a well-deserved romp with her hero. Most importantly she learns how a real man is quite different from the cads she’s known.

After their brief night together Vivienne wonders if their encounter will spoil her for other men. I wonder the same thing myself. Will the other Ian Fleming 007 novels, the ones with the global weapons and directives from M, pale in comparison with this one? Like Vivienne, I guess I won’t know until I try.

Papa, I Can Hear You

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Thu, 6 Apr 2006 20:47:00 -0700

Shame-Faced Admission™: I’ve only read Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction. And not much of it at that.

“The Killers” turns up in numerous collections of noir writing and I devour it every time. “Fathers and Sons” I came across in an anthology, and it left a mark. There are one or two others, the titles of which escape me now. But his longer work is terra incognita to me.

Hemingway looms so large in American letters that I knew he had to be the first author I read as part of this project. So which book did I choose? The Nick Adams Stories, which:

a. is not a novel, and
b. contains the two stories I knew I’d read.

Hardly an auspicious beginning. But I view this process as a marathon. I don’t want to pull something early and come up lame.

The collection, originally published in 1972, is the first to put every story about Hemingway’s alter ego in chronological order, following Nick from childhood to fatherhood. Several of the pieces are incomplete, fragments of what Hemingway intended as longer works.

My favorite story was easily “Big Two-Hearted River,” in which Nick heads deep into the Michigan woods, builds a camp, and goes fishing. That’s it. The story benefits from being placed in sequence; it occurs after Nick has returned from action overseas, and his monastic trip is clearly a way for him to exorcise his demons. Curiously, “A Way You’ll Never Be,” the story that precedes it and illuminates what those demons are, was published eight years later.

But it’s not the context that gives the story its power; Rosemarie, who also read the book, said, “Sorry. All I got out of that one was fishing.” It’s the marriage of technique and theme. Hemingway describes simple actions with similar prose. The unadorned language mirrors Nick’s efforts: hard work, carefully observed, yields its own satisfactions. Knowing what Nick has recently endured only adds to the effect, allowing you to see how this trip heals him.

Rosemarie singled out “The Last Good Country,” an unfinished novella, in which Nick and his younger sister go on the run when Nick is accused of poaching. It has wonderful moments, but it’s obviously meant to be something more. “Fathers and Sons,” with Nick reflecting on his own youth while his son sleeps beside him, hasn’t lost any of its impact.

I’m ready to move on to Hemingway’s novels. Reading the short stories has been like peering into the windows of a house. Now I want to see what’s inside.

Ground Rules, Double

shamefacedblog@gmail.com (Vince Keenan & Rosemarie Keenan) — Wed, 5 Apr 2006 20:51:00 -0700

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. – H. G. Wells

Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding. – Ambrose Bierce

Good quotations, huh? Pithy, that’s what they are. I got them out of a book of quotations. I didn’t know them from their source material. But as Churchill said, “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.”

I wonder if that quote helps move copies.

‘Classic.’ A book which people praise and don’t read. – Mark Twain

I don’t necessarily think of myself as an uneducated man. I know, for instance, that Moby Dick is by Herman Melville, it’s about a whale, and that Homer Simpson is incorrect when he says that the moral of the book is “Be yourself.”

But I haven’t read Moby Dick. Nor have I attempted a great many other of the classics. I am not proud of this fact. It is one I would very much like to change.

Thus, Shame-Faced was born.

The proper study of mankind is books. – Aldous Huxley

It’s a bit of received wisdom that the first step toward solving a problem is admitting that you have one. All right. In this blog, I will admit which of the world’s great books I haven’t read by actually reading them. So will the lovely and talented Rosemarie, devoted pseudo-intellectual and former Jeopardy! contestant. We’ll suggest titles to each other, maybe tackle the same ones together, have a few laughs along the way.

If we don’t like a book, we’ll be honest about it. In the words of E. M. Forster, “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.”

I haven’t read any Forster, either. Damn. Should probably add him to the list.

Speaking of the list, it won’t be all broccoli; popular authors that we’ve somehow missed will be on it as well. And it won’t be all books, either.

There is only one thing that can kill the Movies, and that is education. – Will Rogers

There are plenty of well-known movies, high and low, that one or both of us have managed to get this far without seeing. (Here’s a Shame-Faced Admission™ for you: I just watched Gone With The Wind for the first time last year. What can I say? I thought it was a chick flick.)

Not to mention certain legendary TV series. Any work of art or culture that we’ve been faking familiarity with for years is fair game. Maybe by the time we’re done, Rosemarie and I will have become the learned, well-rounded individuals we have always pretended to be.

But I kind of doubt it.